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    Interesting Vista Quirk with dual boot

    Discussion in 'Windows OS and Software' started by Rodster, Oct 13, 2007.

  1. Rodster

    Rodster Merica

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    You guys and gals who are considering going dual boot with Vista might want to be on the lookout for this quirk. I have three SATA drives in my rig.

    Drive C: 250GB Vista (Primary Partition)
    Drive D: 400GB Vista (Primary Partition)
    Drive E: 500GB XP Pro (Primary Partition)

    I used EASYbcd to setup my Vista boot configuration since it was the first OS installed.

    Now for the intersting part

    When I boot up Vista from Drive C: or Drive D: if you look at your drives under disk manager. Vista will always assign the drive you booted from as Drive C: as the system drive. Just an FYI just in case you think you booted from drive d: when Vista really sees it as Drive C:....ouch talk about confusion. ;)

    Again this only applies to a dual or multiple boot configuration. When your in Windows XP it sees all the drive assignments correctly i.e. Drive E: XP Pro.
     
  2. ScifiMike12

    ScifiMike12 Drinking the good stuff

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    That's why I label my partitions: Windows XP, Windows XP x64, Vista x86 SP1, Vista x64..

    Mike.
     
  3. frazell

    frazell Notebook Deity

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    This is the way Windows has always labeled drives... It always assigns the boot drive C:...
     
  4. jtmat

    jtmat Notebook Evangelist

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    I like it... with dual boot running since January, I've had zero issues with it. In the past, when I had dual boot partitions, there were all kinds of issues. I can't remember if those labeled themselves as "c:" or as the drive I was in.

    I see where this can be an issue with three drives for some people, guess since I dual boot off of one drive it is less of an issue for me (drive is partitioned off with c: and d:, with d: as vista).